The TikTok Ban and the Power of Controlling Human Thought

This will be a post with mainly questions and no answers. Sometimes, raising the questions is all you need in order for collective creativity to blossom and answers to emerge.

On April 23, 2024, the US Senate passed the TikTok bill (H.R. 7521). For you, maybe that felt like a slap in the face of free speech (or, if you are an influencer, your livelihood). Maybe it felt like you could finally breathe a sigh of relief. Regardless of how you feel about it, the bill brings us to face a difficult human reality: what to do about the massive power that comes with controlling human thought.

If you haven’t already started with acknowledging that power, let me first call to mind that essentially every non-weather-related massive loss of human life and wellbeing has come from some person or entity controlling human thought at scale.

Large-scale and smaller-scale, this is the case.

Think about every war you can remember, every genocide, every mass example of slavery or indentured servitude: religious wars fought because of belief in a deity or theology, governmental wars fought because of a mass ideology, militaries trained to unify for “us” and against “them.”

Think about every widespread cultural norm that is harmful to wellbeing: advertising campaigns for tobacco leading to widespread tobacco use, constant promotion of specific body-types fueling industries for fad diets, plastic surgery, etc.

Every cult that has stolen children from parents, or parents from children, or humans from freedom; the widespread plague of adolescent anxiety, which is showing itself more and more as clearly linked to messaging that keeps kids online and detached from the real world.

Every Kool-Aid-drinking incident has been based on the manipulation of human thought.

Theorizing about the future, if AI is to conduct a human takeover, it will also very likely be through manipulation of human thought (unless we get a whole lot better at building robots).

There is an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (one of the all-time best shows ever made, and Joss Whedon’s crowning achievement. This is a fact, not an opinion), wherein Willow scans a book page containing the demon, Moloch into the school computer, which uploads him to the internet. Moloch’s power — and Joss’s genius commentary on human weakness — comes not from Moloch’s physical strength, but from his ability to manipulate the minds of the humans with whom he interacts. In fact, Moloch’s demise comes when he takes his corporeal form, because it is only then that he can be destroyed.

It is our collective Achille's heel that we are so majorly affected by groupthink and large-scale cognitive blind spots. But we are.

And for better or worse, we have now invented methods for global persuasion. Within those methods, we have built tools for very specific and extreme types of persuasion. We’ve given ourselves the peer pressure we warned our teenage children about — on scales and in doses previously unimagined.

So what to do about it? Do we give control to a small group of governing men who sit in a room and decide what social score to give their citizens? Do we give control to unfettered capitalism (or, worse, fettered capitalism)? Do we give control to factions and special interests? There is no leaving things to any natural course, because every algorithm becomes unnatural one way or another.

When we warned our teenagers about the old-school, real-world peer pressure, we knew that we could not change their brain function, so we told them instead to “choose good friends.”

How do we “choose good friends” when it comes to the current tools of human persuasion? How can we find the Leave-it-to-Beavers when they look and dress just like Ted Bundy? And if we control it all so it all looks nice and clean (and homogenous), will we accidentally snuff out every Tara Maclay, every Jonathan Byers, every Sirius Black?

Maybe there is a way to take back control on an individual level, to stop buying the Volksempfänger radio and listening to propaganda all day?

Maybe we just need to — individually — pause the apps, delete the media, stop reading the messaging?

Maybe if we go for more walks and leave the phone at home, we can free our minds, even just a little? I mean, I have yet to find a group of trees and shrubbery who successfully convinced a group of humans to kill one another, or who even caused an argument at the dinner table.

Wait, do dinner tables even exist anymore?

— — — — — —

If you liked or learned from this story, please clap👏 👏 👏, highlight, share with anyone who’d enjoy it, and follow my page. Thanks for reading!